The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot the Tea Party?

Posted on | July 11, 2019 | Comments Off on Whiskey Tango Foxtrot the Tea Party?

by Smitty

Conspicuously absent in Daniel McCarthy’s analysis is any Tea Party mention:

Trump also realized, as Perot should have recognized a quarter-century earlier, that third-party politics was a waste of time, when the same resources could be used to take over the GOP from within. Republican voters, if not Republican elites, still wanted the party to be that of Nixon and Reagan, not just the Bushes — the party of the Rust Belt and Reagan Democrats, not just the party of Social Security privatizers and military contractors. Trump put the politics of Perot and Buchanan together into a winning force on the right and a winning force in the 2016 election.

Granted, the purpose of the article is to contrast Trump and Perot.
However, both Obama’s election and the Tea Party uprising of 2009 are key to understanding 2016.

Perot was certainly a bridge from Reagan, as well as my first Presidential vote.

What’s increasingly clear is that, under the buffoon facade, Trump has been a deep student of politics. Which is why Ryan’s observation: “I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government,” is at least partially incorrect. Trump clearly knew how to win an election, even if he wasn’t burdened with the details of the Byzantine train wreck that is the U.S. government.

Trump undertook a great deal of risk and hit a very small target of being sufficiently together to win, while broadcasting an image of continually falling apart. Were Trump to have been a better student of how things are supposed to work, any of the myriad of traps set for him might have been successful. Trump appears to have a “Forrest Gump” touch for failing upward, but his success is more due to pure savvy than deus ex machina.

In the Tea Party case, Trump was nowhere to be seen in 2009, yet I’m confident that the bulk of Tea Partiers voted Trump, modulo a fraction of benighted types who blew their ballots on Evan MuMullen.

Category: Uncategorized

History as Heritage and Legacy (and Something I Learned About My Parents)

Posted on | July 11, 2019 | Comments Off on History as Heritage and Legacy (and Something I Learned About My Parents)

 

Who are those good-looking young people? That’s my mother and father, as students at the University of Alabama circa 1950. Dad was a World War II veteran attending on the G.I. Bill, and I’m not sure if he met my mother in Tuscaloosa, or if she started going there after he married her. Both of them were from Randolph County, Alabama, and nearly all my ancestors are buried in two cemeteries there, Dad’s family at Ava Methodist Church and Mom’s family at Big Springs Baptist.

One of the things about knowing who your ancestors were is that it gives you a sense of personal connection to history. Because I knew that my father was a veteran — he was wounded by German shrapnel while serving in a forward reconnaissance unit in France — I was always interested in World War II. My interest in Civil War history could be traced to sixth grade, when I did a social-studies project about the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. When I was a boy growing up in Lithia Springs, Georgia, Dad used to take us fishing at Lake Altoona, which we reached by driving up past Lost Mountain and Cheatham Hill in western Cobb County, so I was familiar with the terrain. Also, the ruins of the New Manchester mill, burned by Sherman’s cavalry in 1864 and now part of Sweetwater Creek State Park, were the destination of an obligatory field trip when I was in elementary school. I started digging deeper into Civil War history when, as a teenager, I read a multi-part series about Sherman’s Georgia campaign in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was not until many years later, in 1990, during a visit to the Ava church cemetery, that I saw a plaque on the grave of my great-grandfather, Winston Wood Bolt, that led me to research his service in the 13th Alabama Infantry and discover that he had been captured, along with Brig. Gen. J.J. Archer, in the opening clash of the Battle of Gettysburg.

How many Americans know anything about the lives of their great-grandparents? How many even know the names of their great-grandparents? What happens to a people who know nothing of their own history? “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors,” as Edmund Burke wrote, conveying the value of our sense of historic tradition as an inheritance, an ancestral legacy that we have an obligation to pass on to our descendants. When we think of how to raise our children, shouldn’t this involve some effort to help them become people that their ancestors would be proud of? Isn’t it a valuable source of self-esteem to a child to know something of the struggles that his ancestors survived? Isn’t a young person more likely to conduct himself with courage and dignity if he thinks of himself as an heir to a legacy, who has a duty to uphold the honor of his ancestors?

For an entire century, from at least the 1840s until World War II, nearly all my ancestors resided in Randolph County, Alabama, which was a frontier wilderness when they arrived as pioneers and which is still largely rural today. My parents were part of a sort of diaspora of rural America in the mid-20th century. After Dad graduated at Tuscaloosa, they moved to Atlanta, where Dad’s brother-in-law helped him get a job with the Southern Railroad. After working a year there, he hired on at the Lockheed plant in Marietta, where he worked the next 37 years.

My brothers and I grew up in middle-class suburbia, but with a strong sense of our roots in rural Alabama. Both of my grandfathers died before I was born, but we spent a lot of time with our grandmothers. Ma Kirby lived in LaGrange, Georgia, where she worked at Callaway’s mill, and lived in a tidy little house on Park Avenue. The tree-lined streets of LaGrange were picturesque, and as a boy visiting Ma Kirby, I loved walking to the store or to the swimming pool with my brothers and cousins. Ma Kirby was a gentle and genial soul, devoutly religious, but full of cheerful good humor. Our father’s mother, Ma McCain, was more stoic in temperament, as she still resided on the family farm near the Little Tallapoosa River, where she drew her water from the well, cooked on a wood-burning stove and didn’t have indoor plumbing until about 1969. To use the bathroom at Ma McCain’s you went out behind the barn.

Having some sense of the hardship of my pioneer ancestors’ life on the frontier — Ma McCain hoed her vegetable garden well into her 80s — conveyed to me the idea that I was the descendant of survivors. Whatever difficulties and challenges I’ve faced in life are as nothing compared to what my ancestors lived through 150 or 200 years ago. Considering that my own father came within an inch of death in World War II, I think of my existence as somewhat miraculous, and therefore I should be grateful to God even to be alive. How many young Americans today grow up with this sense of themselves as a descendant of heroic survivors?

Mom and Dad Were Kissing Cousins?

One of the amusing aspects of having so many generations of my ancestors being from Randolph County is that I’m kin to nearly everyone there. When I attended Jacksonville (Ala.) State University, if I ever met someone from Randloph County, we’d start talking and trying to figure out how we were related, because surely we were cousins somehow. In fact, my Dad used to say that he thought he and my mother must have been distant cousins, which I didn’t believe — until just this morning!

Back in the 1990s, when I was doing historical research into my family tree, there was no Internet, and going through census records and other archival materials involved spending hours scrolling through microfilm records. So I knew that my father’s mother, Perlonia Bolt McCain, was the daughter of Confederate veteran Winston Bolt, and although I researched Private Bolt’s ancestry, I didn’t research his wife, except to note that her maiden name was Chaffin. And while I was familiar with Ma Kirby’s ancestors — her mother was a Fincher, and we used to attend the Fincher clan reunion at Big Springs every August — I’d never done much research into my grandfather Kirby’s ancestors. Well, a lot of records are online now, so I was able to learn that my great-grandfather William Thomas “Tom” Kirby’s wife, née Martha Elizabeth Almon (1872-1914), was the daughter of North Carolina native Elijah R. Almon (1839-1875), whose wife Eliza (1844-1901) — my great-great-grandmother — was the daughter of Nathan Perry Chaffin (1821-1888).

Wait a minute — Chaffin?

Eliza Chaffin Almon’s father was the son of Virginia native Tyre Chaffin (1797-1878), who moved to Georgia, where he became a church deacon and the father of 11 children, one of whom was Eliza’s father, and another was Moses Burris Chaffin (1823-1864), who served in the 8th Alabama Infantry and was killed during the fighting around Petersburg, Virginia. Moses Chaffin’s daughter, Frances Elizabeth, married Winston Bolt.

Therefore, my mother and father were both descendants of Tyre Chaffin, who was my father’s great-great-grandfather, and my mother’s great-great-great-grandfather. (Check my math on that.) My parents were third cousins twice removed, or something like that, and I’ll defer to genealogy experts on the exact terminology. Because Eliza Chaffin Almon died in 1888, 26 years before her grandson (my grandfather) Hermit Eiland Kirby was born, it was highly unlikely that my mother was aware that her great-grandmother was a Chaffin. It was somewhat more likely that my father knew that his grandmother Bolt’s maiden name was Chaffin, although she died before my Dad was two years old, but it would have been almost impossible for him and my mother to have figured out how they were related without access to genealogical records.

Well, my children have the benefit of the research I’ve done, so they know who their ancestors were and they’re unlikely to marry their cousins — not that there’s anything wrong with that, you know. Anything beyond first cousins is what folks down home call “kissing cousins,” and beyond second cousins, the degree of consanguinity is small enough that there’s little risk of hereditary defect, so long as a pattern of in-group marriage is not repeated in successive generations. Because I married a girl from Ohio, to whom I couldn’t possibly be related (except perhaps if you traced our ancestry back to England, or maybe the very earliest colonial era in America), there would be little risk if our children or grandchildren married someone whose parents could trace their roots back to Randolph County, Alabama, and thus are potential distant cousins.

From a knowledge of our ancestors, we gain a sense of our own lives as a bridge between the past and the future. My ancestors lived in a world that existed before I was born, which I can know only from history, and my descendants will live in a future that is beyond my imagination.

“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion — to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future. . . .
“Narcissism emerges as the typical form of character structure in a society that has lost interest in the future.”
— Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)

Maintaining our “sense of historical continuity,” as Lasch called it, provides us with a bulwark against the “prevailing passion” of narcissism, which has only grown worse in the four decades since Lasch so brilliantly analyzed it. What inspired me to write this lengthy post was that Gene Wisdom, a JSU classmate, called my attention to a recent reissue of Family and Civilization, a 1947 book by Harvard University sociologist Carle Zimmerman, who died in 1983. In this book, Professor Zimmerman wrote: “The struggle over the modern family and its present rapid trend toward a climactic breakup will be one of the most interesting and decisive ones in all history.” According to one review, Professor Zimmerman “predicted many of today’s cultural and social controversies and trends — including youth violence and depression, abortion and homosexuality, the demographic collapse of Europe and of the West more generally, and the displacement of peoples.”

Religious devotion, when coupled with a knowledge of our ancestors, can be a powerful antidote to the degenerate trends of our age. Remember my ancestor Tyre Chaffin, from whom both of my parents were descended? In 1828, age 31, he was ordained a deacon of what is now Zion Baptist Church in Covington, Georgia, and according to one memorial, the deacon “was a devoted man, to his God, to his church, to his pastor and his family; always taking a decided stand against the fashionable vices of nominal professors, and in favor of the true and second determination to live right.” Until this morning, however, I had never known about Deacon Chaffin, who was such an influential figure in the Christian faith of his community and who sired a remarkably large brood of offspring that included ancestors of both my parents. Speaking of family . . .

My older brother Kirby is currently out of work because he’s got to go through some medical testing as part of federal regulations that require truckers to get their health recertified annually. The doctors want to do a scan on his carotid artery, and that might lead to another surgery, so he’s got a fundraiser going at GoFundMe, and I’d be most grateful if readers could contribute to help him through this situation.

Thanks in advance, and God bless you.



 

Category: Family, History

SJWs Ruin New ‘Terminator’ Sequel

Posted on | July 11, 2019 | Comments Off on SJWs Ruin New ‘Terminator’ Sequel

 

Ace of Spades describes the SJW movie formula:

When you’ve got a piece of sh– on your hands, politicize the living f*** out of it, so when it flops, you can blame Toxic White Men.

Nailed it. Question: What is the purpose of a movie? To entertain audiences. To sell tickets. To make money. At least, that’s the purpose of all successful movies — appeal to a mass audience and maximize profit.

 

Casablanca had a political purpose, to promote sympathy for the Allied cause in World War II, but the producer (Hal Wallis, who later produced all those shlocky Elvis movies) also had a keen eye for the commercial prospects of the story, so that the romance between the cynical hero (Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine) and the glamorous Ingrid Bergman as refugee Ilsa Lund transcends everything else. Even if the 1942 moviegoer had been entirely indifferent about the Nazi occupation of Europe, well, hey, Ingrid Bergman is still a hot number. Let’s face it, even der Führer himself would agree — Nordic chicks are hot.

Oh, wait, guess what the original Terminator had going for it?

 

Yep, a Nordic blonde playing the damsel in distress, functionally analogous to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. It might seem farfetched to compare a schlocky science-fiction thriller to Casablanca, and you might object that Linda Hamilton is no Ingrid Bergman, but from the audience perspective, the theme of the beautiful young woman in peril, with the hero coming to rescue her from danger, is a winning formula. It’s transcendent, the stuff of classics. Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, Han Solo and Princess Leia in Star Wars — all variations on this same timeless theme. In all of these blockbuster Hollywood classics, the damsel in distress is a spunky, resourceful kind of woman, and the hero is a cynical character who does the right thing despite his own selfish nature. If you watch the first Star Wars movie, it’s really sort of lame until Han Solo enters the picture, and the sparks that fly between him and Leia are what gives the film its best scenes.

Han Solo is Rick Blaine is Rhett Butler.

Princess Leia is Ilsa Lund is Scarlett O’Hara.

It’s a formula, see? And the reason it has been repeated so often is because it works — it sells tickets because audiences love it.

Well, what about the new Terminator sequel?

[Variety magazine]: An early “Dark Fate” poster received backlash, calling Davis and her co-stars “feminazis” and other chauvinist hate speech. How do you think she’ll be received in the room at Comic-Con?
[Director Tim Miller]: If you’re at all enlightened, she’ll play like gangbusters. If you’re a closet misogynist, she’ll scare the f–k out of you, because she’s tough and strong but very feminine. We did not trade certain gender traits for others; she’s just very strong, and that frightens some dudes. You can see online the responses to some of the early s–t that’s out there, trolls on the internet. I don’t give a f–k.

You see? The movie is aimed at an “enlightened” audience, so if you’re a sociology major at Oberlin College, you’re gonna love it. But if you don’t want to pay $12.50 to watch this Gender Studies lecture disguised as a science-fiction movie, that means you’re a “closet misogynist.”

Who decided that movies should be a litmus-test of the political attitudes of audiences? When did producers decide it was OK to sink millions of dollars into movies that appeal only to “enlightened” viewers? And why does Tim Miller think insulting “trolls on the internet” is sufficient justification for making a lousy movie with a $200 million budget?



 

Category: Hollywood

In The Mailbox: 07.10.19

Posted on | July 11, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #677
EBL: Rip Torn, RIP
Twitchy: Brit Hume Drops Sarcasm Hammer On Mitch McConnell “Scoop” – Kamala Harris, Media Credibility Hardest Hit
Louder With Crowder: Qweerty Accuses Trump Supporters Of Hating Lesbian Soccer Star, Gets Ratioed

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Deriving Your Value From A Girl
American Greatness: Tired, Irrelevant Democratic Candidates Point To Trump Re-Election
American Power: Megan Rapinoe
American Thinker: Bill Clinton Was Frequent Flyer On Epstein’s “Lolita Express”, also, The New Heretics
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Cuban Pastor Imprisoned For Homeschooling His Kids Transferred To Maximum Security Cell
BattleSwarm: Epstein Underage Sex Trafficking Indictment Roundup
Camp of the Saints: We Constitutionalists Just Won’t Go Away – #OUTLAW!
CDR Salamander: Riverine – The More The Better
Da Tech Guy: “You’re The First Trump Supporter I’ve Met”, also, Dynasty Baseball/USA Today Tournament Is Tomorrow Night At 8 PM! (Eastern Time)
Don Surber: From Perot To Palin To Trumpenfreude, also, TrumpenJOY For Kanye West
Dustbury: Colonel Sanders To The Red Courtesy Phone
First Street Journal: Amy McGrath Henderson Thinks She Can Beat Mitch McConnell
The Geller Report: Fauxcahontas Says She’d Push Israel To Surrender Its Land, also, AOC’s Chief Of Staff Wears Nazi T-Shirt
Hogewash: Trump Wins One In The Fourth Circuit, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Netflix’s Glaring Double Standard On Full Display
Joe For America: Who’s Paying For Pedo Billionaire Epstein’s Boeing 727, Mansions, & Sexcapade Island?
JustOneMinute: Epstein “Belonged To Intelligence”?
Legal Insurrection: Mitch McConnell’s 2020 Dem Challenger Compare’s Trump’s Election to 9/11, also, Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College – $5 Million Legal Fees May Be A Floor Not A Ceiling
Michelle Malkin: Epstein, Bean, & Buck – The Democratic Donors’ Sex Creep Club
The PanAm Post: AMLO Lays Off Mexican Healthcare Workers To Hire Cuban Slave Doctors
Power Line: Epstein Is Clinton’s Problem, Not Trump’s, also, Alex Acosta Speaks
Shark Tank: Marco Rubio Files Holocaust Education Bill
Shot In The Dark: When You Could Swear It’s Gotta Be The Babylon Bee…
STUMP: Deaths In The Dominican Republic – Westchester County Woman Dies
The Political Hat: British Police Now Confiscating Miniature Toy Baseball Bats
This Ain’t Hell: Tactical Nukes, also, Cincinnati Incident
Victory Girls: Occasional Cortex Learns The Road Goes Both Ways
Volokh Conspiracy: Judge BLocks DOJ’s Attempt To Switch Lawyers In Census Citizenship Question Case
Weasel Zippers: Trump Wins Again – UK Ambassador To US Resigns After Cable Leak, also, Schumer Got Thousands In Donations From Pedo Epstein
Mark Steyn: Is It Hot In Here Or Is It Just Me?


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Category: Linkagery

Nigerian Immigrant Could Face Death Penalty in ‘Sugar Baby’ Murder Case

Posted on | July 10, 2019 | Comments Off on Nigerian Immigrant Could Face Death Penalty in ‘Sugar Baby’ Murder Case

Ayoola Ajayi (left) is accused of murdering Mackenzie Lueck (right).

The Salt Lake Tribune:

The man accused of killing University of Utah student MacKenzie Lueck has been charged with aggravated murder and aggravated kidnapping days after police found her body in Logan Canyon.
Ayoola Ajayi, 31, faces four felony counts, including second-degree felony obstruction of justice and third-degree felony desecration of a body, in the high-profile case that has captivated the state and the nation since Lueck disappeared on June 17.
The charges, filed Wednesday by Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, say Lueck died of blunt force trauma to her head. Gill said her body was found with her arms bound behind her back by a zip tie and rope. . . .
Ajayi had been booked into jail June 28 on suspicion of the same counts. The aggravated murder charge carries a potential death penalty if Ajayi is convicted.
“I can absolutely tell you that no deals have been made whatsoever,” Gill said at a news conference Wednesday, adding, “I think it would be premature to talk about the death penalty.” . . .Investigators have said that Lueck took a Lyft from the airport to Hatch Park in North Salt Lake in the early morning of June 17. She was picked up there by Ajayi, police said, and her phone stopped transmitting data at that point. A police search of Lueck’s phone showed he was the last person who communicated with her.
Gill declined to comment on the “prior history” between Lueck and Ajayi, or on “the nature or the contents” of texts between [Lueck and Ajayi] early on June 17. . . .
Cellphone records showed Ajayi was near Logan Canyon on June 25, Gill said. On July 3rd, police went to Logan Canyon to search for Lueck’s body and located a disturbed area of soil under trees. They discovered a charred human body and DNA testing returned a profile consistent with Lueck, he said.
“This was an area that was off the main road” in Logan Canyon, Gill said. “A wooded area.”
The canyon is two hours north of Salt Lake City. He did not comment on where he believes Lueck was killed. Ajayi attended Utah State University, which is located in Logan, near the canyon.

“No deals have been made” — the prosecutors believe they have enough evidence to convict Ajayi in a courtroom trial, so they have no motive to offer a plea bargain. We might suppose that Ajayi would have a better chance of avoiding the death penalty if he pleads guilty, and of course, this would spare the taxpayers the expense of a trial, but if the prosecution believes they’ve got an open-and-shut case, they’re not going to let Ajayi off with anything less than life without parole.

Notice that the prosecutor doesn’t want to get into the details on why this college girl agreed to meet Ajayi at a park at 3 a.m.  Mackenzie Lueck had apparently been meeting men through “sugar baby” sites and dating apps, and what were she and Ajayi texting about? Well, I doubt she agreed to get hogtied and beaten to death, and have her corpse burned and dumped in a remote canyon.  But that was Ajayi’s plan, allegedly.



 

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Category: Utah, Violence Against Women

In The Mailbox: 07.09.19

Posted on | July 9, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.09.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Meanwhile, In The People’s Republic Of California…
EBL:  Ross Perot, RIP, also, Cow Appreciation Day
Twitchy: Ian Millhiser Warns Of Biggest Mass Killing On American Soil Since Civil War…Or Was That The Tax Cuts?
Louder With Crowder: Mitch McConnell’s Response To Question About Slave-Owning Ancestors Is Beyond Savage

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Butt-Backwards U.S. Economy
American Greatness: Donald Trump’s 4th Of July Reality Show
American Thinker: The American Left’s Army Of Dupes
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Armed Lefties News
Babalu Blog: Socialism Or Death! Castro Regime Sells Rotten Meat To Pregnant Women, Diabetics
BattleSwarm: Taiwan To Buy 108 Abrams Tanks, also, Ross Perot Dead At 89
Camp of the Saints: A New, Increasingly Widespread Form Of Child Abuse
CDR Salamander: FREMM Bulks Up
Da Tech Guy: Antifa & The Media, also, Fighting For The Serf Turf
Don Surber: Obama Judge Sides With Big Pharma, also, Highlights Of The News
Dustbury: Possibly Triple Or Fourple
First Street Journal: The WaPo & NBC Bring Up The Trivial To Trash Mitch McConnell
The Geller Report: Top Ranking Member Of House Foreign Affairs Committee Calls For Ouster Of Ilhan Omar, also, Tommy Robinson To Seek Asylum In U.S., Says He’ll Be Murdered In U.K. Prison
Hogewash: They’re Not Going To Like Their New Rules, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Sinbad’s Big Regret – An Infamous “Celebrity” Show Stint
Joe For America: After Nike Caves To Kaepernick & Liberals Again, Another Company Steps Up Big Time
Legal Insurrection: Ilhan Omar Lies To High School Students About Racial Injustice, also, BET Founder Robert Johnson – Democratic Party Has Moved Too Far To The Left
The PanAm Post: The Global Order Ignores Venezuela Because It Presents An Inconvenient Truth
Power Line: Eric Felten – Insinuendo In The Mueller Report, also, Epstein Indictment Puts Spotlight Back On Acosta
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Takes Daily Dump On Maduro-Supporting Democrats
Shot In The Dark: An Intellectual 0-0 Tie
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – New Jersey DEATHMATCH!
The Political Hat: Ensuring The Right Of Every Free Adult
This Ain’t Hell: USAF Marathon Man, also, Why Legit Veterans Can Turn My Stomach & A Smugnorance Gives Me Gas
Victory Girls: Chuck Schumer Ties Sec. Acosta & Trump To Epstein
Volokh Conspiracy: How To Make Bar Exams Great Again
Weasel Zippers: Surveillance Shows 60 Teenagers Mobbing A Walgreens In Philly, also, Warren Says As President She’ll End Israel’s Occupation Of Gaza
Megan McArdle: Why The Debate About Equal Pay For U.S. Women’s Soccer Isn’t That Clear Cut
Mark Steyn: Come, Josephine, In My Flying Machine, also, Rip Van Woken In A Land Of Non-Binary Oreos

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Category: Linkagery

‘Canadian Humanitarian,’ IYKWIMAITYD

Posted on | July 9, 2019 | 1 Comment

Peter Dalglish (left) and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (right).

Hiding in plain sight:

A lauded Canadian humanitarian was sentenced to nine years in prison by a Nepali court for raping two young boys last year.
Peter Dalglish, who worked for decades as an advocate for children in impoverished corners of the world, was convicted in June of sexually assaulting the boys — aged 12 and 14 — last year in Kartike, a small Nepali village of rutted roads where he built a home.
It is unclear if the 62-year-old, who has maintained his innocence, plans to appeal the sentence, which was delivered in a district court and included a small cash payment to each of the victims’ families. . . .
International activists following Dalglish’s case said the ruling was just one step in addressing grave accusations of sexual abuse against children in Nepal, where thousands of nongovernmental organisations operate with limited oversight.
“Peter Dalglish’s sentencing is an alarm bell for the humanitarian community,” said Lori Handrahan, a veteran international aid worker and author, urging her colleagues “to tackle the pervasive problem of predators in our humanitarian workplace.”

More background on Daglish:

Dalglish . . . has spent decades working in Africa and Asia to combat child poverty.
In the late 1980s, he co-founded Street Kids International, a Canadian NGO focused on delivering programs to help improve the living conditions for vulnerable kids in developing countries.
More recently, Dalglish served as a senior adviser to the UN Habitat in Afghanistan, as well as worked with the World Health Organization and the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response in Liberia.
In December 2016, Dalglish was named a member of the Order of Canada for his humanitarian work.

How many “humanitarians” like Dalglish are also pedophiles? Isn’t the whole “international aid” racket the perfect vehicle for these perverts? Create a tax-exempt “charity” and fly off to some Third World country to “help the children,” and figure that none of the impoverished natives will make a fuss if your definition of “help” is somewhat flexible.

(Hat-tip: Lori Handrahan on Twitter.)



 

Category: Canada, Crime

MSNBC and CNN Are Trying to Spin the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Against Trump

Posted on | July 9, 2019 | 1 Comment

Everybody with access to a computer can discover that Bill Clinton took dozens of flights on billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet, nicknamed the “Lolita Express,” and yet viewers of the liberal cable channels are being treated to a warped version of the story in which Epstein is falsely depicted as Donald Trump’s best friend, and the real scandal involves Trump’s Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta.

This partisan spin is being replicated on broadcast network news, as Kristine Marsh of Newsbusters notes that ABC’s Good Morning America (hosted by former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos) covered the latest Epstein charges without even mentioning Bill Clinton:

CBS and NBC, on the other hand, tried to connect Epstein to Trump. While NBC’s Stephanie Gosk gave a passing mention to both Clinton and Trump (without any mention of the “Lolita Express”), CBS This Morning’s Mola Lenghi spent more time on both Trump and Clinton, while emphasizing comments Trump made praising Epstein in 2002:

Epstein has had several high-profile friendships in the past. Bill Clinton reportedly rode on his jet more than a dozen times in the early 2000s. In a 2002 interview, then private citizen Donald Trump called Epstein ‘a terrific guy’ and ‘it’s even said he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them, are on the younger side.’

However, Lenghi didn’t mention that after Epstein had been convicted of assaulting an underage girl, Trump had barred him from Mar-a-Lago. 
All three networks didn’t mention either that Epstein was a major donor to Democrats for years, a fact that most certainly would’ve made the cut had he donated to Republicans.

“Democratic Party operatives with bylines,” as someone keeps saying.

As for the question of why Acosta, as a federal prosecutor in 2008, gave Epstein a “sweetheart deal” (a phrase repeated endlessly on MSNBC and CNN), this is explained by the fact that (a) Epstein is a wealthy man who could afford the best defense lawyers in the country, and (b) prosecutors generally prefer plea bargains to court trials, especially in cases like this one. Would you want to put Epstein’s former victims on the witness stand and expose them to cross-examination, with defense lawyers picking apart every detail of their testimony and every contradiction between what they said in court and what they’d previously told investigators?

Beyond any consideration of partisan politics or media bias, the aspersions being cast on Acosta for a lenient plea-bargain with Epstein are an appeal to ignorance, intended to inflame the indignation of people whose ideas of the criminal justice system are based on watching TV dramas like Law & Order: SVU and CSI Miami. In the real world, people who commit very serious crimes of violence — armed robbery, aggravated assault, rape — are allowed to plead guilty to lesser charges and often turned loose after only a year or two in jail. If you imagine that prosecutors had an slam-dunk case against Epstein and had nothing to lose by taking the caase to trial, you can make Acosta the villain in the story. Watching MSNBC this morning, viewers might be forgiven for suspecting that Acosta himself was banging teenage girls on Epstein’s private island, such is the presentation of the story. The focus on Acosta, however, is simply a way to divert attention from Bill Clinton’s notorious association with Epstein, and to turn this story into a Trump scandal.



 

Category: Media Bias, Scandal
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